


Start a Fire, Let it Burn

by floatingearth



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: Jango Fett Open Seasons (Comics)
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Gen, Injury, Jango Fett has Issues, Slavery, Spice (Star Wars), Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-18 17:42:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29122113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/floatingearth/pseuds/floatingearth
Summary: Jango finds his freedom at the end of a blaster. It takes a long road to get there.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	Start a Fire, Let it Burn

**Author's Note:**

> open seasons not required reading. i've elaborated on six (6) comic panels of flashback. long story short this is about a man who survives out of spite.

The clothes that he was made to wear were little more than faded rags, coarse fabric bunching up at his knees and his elbows. In one fell swoop, he had been stripped of both his armor and his dignity. His wrists were bound with metal cuffs. Hatred burned in his eyes like a fire, and Jango made no attempt to hide it. A crudely armored slaver walked past, gripping a spear. Tattoos swirled across his face. Jango spat on the floor as he passed him by.

The slaver whipped around, lunging at him. He clutched Jango’s face, grimy fingernails digging into his skin. “I could have you wiped away like the mistake you are for that. But no. You’ve got spirit and I want to crush it myself.”

“I will never be your slave,” Jango hissed.

Ignoring him completely, the buyer turned to face the governor of Galidraan. In his silk robes and jewelry, here was the coward who had exploited Jango’s people, taken him prisoner, and was now selling him into slavery. Somehow, he hated Tor Vizsla more. The Governor was nothing but a weak old man who had never had a spine. Vizsla had molded him to his will like a lump of clay, had engineered the deaths of almost everyone Jango ever knew. All of this was Vizsla’s fault. “This one. What’s your price?”

“At least twenty thousand credits. He is young, strong, exactly what you need for a, well, let’s call it a cargo ship.”

“Not worth that much. Ten thousand.”

“Oh, there is no need to try to swindle me. I deserve fifteen thousand. Honestly, I could get more than that a parsec away.” They bartered for him like he was a used speeder bike. Or, more aptly, like a pound of meat back home on Concord Dawn, where the price of every item at the market could be haggled down.

“Then go there. Twelve thousand or I don’t buy it.”

“Alright, alright. Twelve thousand! But only because I want to get rid of him.”

The two men shook hands and exchanged credits.

Then, the slaver pulled a chip injector from his leather belt. Jango stiffened. This was his last stand. He already knew how it would end. His armor, and with it the weaponry he had trained in since he was a young boy, was in a private museum. Apparently, the governor was some kind of _collector_. He knew where it was, but it was gone, and it burned. Even his hands were bound, shackled together.

Winning the fight was impossible, but Jango was not about to make life easy for a slaver. He ducked and swerved, tried to push the man away. All any of it did was prolong the inevitable. A knee to the ribs brought him to the ground. With one quick jab to his neck, the chip was imbedded just below the skin, and his freedom went up in smoke. Sucking air between his teeth, he glared up at the slaver.

“Sooner or later, you’re going to cave,” he was told. The man who thought he owned him yanked him to his feet, dragging him along by the chains to his new prison, a spice transport. Silently, Jango vowed to one day be free again. Until that day came, he would make every moment of his captivity as unpleasant as possible for those who thought they owned him.

The vessel was a _beast_. Apparently, portable drug enterprises were harder to track down. The upper deck was all high ceilings and transparent walls, but those were not for him. He was thrown to the dark, cramped compartments down below. There was strategy to it. If they were pulled over in Republic space, all the dirty little secrets- the slaves and the spice- could be hidden away. The spice itself was fresh from the mines, still in its crystalized form. Deep in the bowels of the ship, they put him to work.

“Grunt work for you.” The slaver shoved him against a machine. “No good for anything else.”

Jango was not sure whether he was supposed to take offense to that or not. The shackles fell off, clanking at his feet. He rubbed at his wrists. Maybe they thought they could make him do their work, but they were wrong.

Something cold with two sharp points pressed into his sternum. The slaver snarled. “You’re too stupid to get it. I’ll tell you. We bought you to _work for us_.”

“So?” Jango locked eyes with him.

“So, get to work.” The spear whirred, powering to life. Then there was only pain, white-hot and burning, as electricity coursed through his body. He fried from the inside out. Overtaken by the spasms, Jango crumpled, leaning against the machine for support. Breathing raggedly, he tried to gather his composure.

He got to work. By the end of the day his back and arms ached like he had been sparring since he woke up. Exhaustion clung to the back of his eyelids. The sting at the back of his neck, where the chip had been implanted, was a constant reminder. A slaver came to dismiss him, and he was corralled back to the slave quarters with the others.

With few exceptions, most of the slaves were human or close to it. Ten or twelve men, plus a handful of teenage boys, were put to each room, with the women across the hall. There was not a scrap of furniture in the place, only a thick layer of grime and a few small piles of useful junk that had been squirreled away. They ate their dinners on the floor.

Jango couldn’t stop from rubbing the back of his neck. The chip was just under his skin. He could feel it, protruding like a bone. It would be so easy to just tear it out of his skin. Then again, he had nowhere to go. Although it was hard to tell with the lack of windows, they had to be in hyperspace by now.

Next to him was a stocky human man with a dark beard and heavy bags under his eyes. In between bites of mash, he said, “Sting’ll go down soon enough. Then it itches for, oh, no more than a week. Soon enough you barely notice it.”

“Who cares? I want it out,” Jango snapped, letting his hand fall to the side.

“That won’t do any good. If you’re lucky- really lucky- you bleed all over the place, and you’re still on this ship with us,” the man said, gesturing with his rusted spoon, “Plus I have to clean it up.”

“And if I’m not, what?” Things could hardly get worse. “I get caught?”

“No. You set off the bomb and blow your guts clean across the room,” the man said. “I’ve seen it happen with my own eyes.”

“Maybe I’ll take a couple slavers out with me.” 

“Now that I’d like to see,” A hand clapped his shoulder. “Word of advice. This is a tough ship. Try not to lose your head, and you might survive.”

Despite his exhaustion, sleep was elusive that night. Even when he closed his eyes, the lights of the cameras in the corners of the room blinked steadily. Some way or another, he would be watched every moment of his life now. At some point he must have passed out. When the morning bell blared, it felt like he had been asleep only moments. A headache throbbed behind his eyes.

“Learn your lesson?”

This was the same brute who had _bought_ him, or at least, the one who had been sent to do it. The ship was full of people like him, tattoos spiraling across their faces. They must have been born on the same planet. Jango refused to answer, silently cursing his name, but he knew now what those spears did. His anger burned hot and bright, but there was nothing to do. Nothing to be gained, either, but another electrocution.

He funneled the crate of raw spice into the machine. In their raw form, the powdery threads were sharp as broken glass. The first one he picked up sliced a line of blood down his palm. Frustrated, Jango swore under his breath. With a splintering noise, the machine crushed the spice down to a powder, one that could be further processed. As he worked, red dust floated up in the still air of the ship.

Spice could do things to a person. This was unrefined, sure, but he could hardly afford that kind of risk. There was nothing to stop it from taking root in his lungs. All he could do was turn his head to the side and hope for the best.

The hours were endless and repetitive. The blood had dried, caking into the creases of his palm. By the time he was released back to the slave’s quarters, his hand was throbbing. Resources were limited. There was no bacta of any kind. There was not even sterile gauze. He rinsed the wound in recycled water and boiled a rag over a hot plate in an attempt to clean it. The last thing he wanted was an infection. The men he roomed with swapped stories. It seemed everyone knew someone, who knew someone else, who had lost a finger to the slave ship. 

“I’m telling you, Sunny, those are just rumors,” said a young redhead sitting in the corner with his arms crossed over his chest.

“They can’t be rumors, new guy cut himself open with one. And my old girl, Mo, happened to her. Thumb was hanging by a thread. Not a pretty sight. Remember that?” Sunny, who could have been brother to the first man, said. 

“Oh, yeah, I _remember_ her alright,” the first man said, a teasing tone to his voice. 

“Shut up before I make you. Anyway, for her it grew back, of course. I think it’s some kind of reptile thing. Like those little lizards, you know?”

The two of them were loud talkers, difficult to ignore as they swapped stories and argued about whether any of them were true.

On a dirty slave ship ran by a crew of thugs, there was only so much that could be done. Jango kept the hand wrapped in bandages he changed when he could, and he tried to keep the wound clean, but the inevitable happened. Within days, his hand turned a dark shade of red and swelled like a bulging piece of fruit. Something hot and liquid was trapped under the skin. He had to drain it.

“Shouldn’t have let it get it infected,” Ravi, an older slave, chastised.

“It’s not really up to me.”

Annoyed, he made a sound in the back of his throat. “Yeah, yeah. Now I have to flush it out, and that won’t be fun for either one of us.”

“I can take care of myself.” Accepting help meant taking on debts he had no way of repaying. “I don’t need your help.”

“Too bad. That’s what you tried last time. Look how well that turned out for you.” Ravi said, heating up the sharp end of a pin. There was a look in his eye, the look that a person got when they remembered a cherished secret. “I might not look it, brother, but I know a thing or two, myself. Wasn’t a slave my whole life.”

“Neither was I.”

Ravi laughed. “I know that. It’s all over your face.”

He ruptured the thin, swollen skin with a quick stab. The relief in pressure as the fluid rushed out was more than worth it. 

After that, he was more careful, but every day was long hours of hard, dangerous labor. His skin was raw. Muscles he had forgotten about in his back and arms ached. If he tried to be stubborn- and he _tried_ \- a blinding stab in the side would leave him shaking. He had no real hope of escape, but he did not need _hope_. He had something vaguely resembling a plan. He had spite. He had a desperate need for revenge. Someday, he would have a chance.

Tor Vizsla had taken everything from him. He had put him here. He was a manipulative, lying murderer. Someday, Jango would leave this ship in flames, and he would rain fire down on Vizsla.

Once, he was almost sold again. A handful of them were lined up, chained from neck to neck, examined by the leader of a rival gang of spice traders. He watched them barter for the woman- a girl, really- chained next to him. With a white, handheld tool, the slavers pulled out her old chip before replacing it with their own.

So. There was a way to take them out. He filed that away somewhere in the back of his mind.

There were no windows in that part of the ship, only sheets of metal and exposed wiring. By the time he first saw his reflection, he had long ago lost track of how much time had passed. They had him on engine duty that day. The engine was steaming, hot and humid enough that he was drenched in seconds. 

He caught sight of his face on a shining metal pipe. The curvature distorted his features, but even without it, he had changed. His sweaty hair was long, clinging to his face and neck. He had an actual beard. That was new. There were small scars he had not had before, a gauntness to his cheeks. If they were still alive to see him, nobody he knew would recognize him. Jango barely recognized himself. Once, he had been a Mandalorian. He did not know what he was now.

He cleaned the engine, and when he was done, a man was dead. A boy, really. Jango knew him and his brother, neither one could have been older than seventeen.

Rumors floated around like seeds in the wind, but the truth was that a too strong shock to the chest had stopped his heart. Despite half a dozen witnesses who all knew the culprit’s face, the killer would face no justice. The dead man was a slave. Jango had not known him well, but he had taken meals with him, slept in the same cell as him. It was a sobering reality. Any moment, another man could decide that it was Jango’s turn to die.

There was no real funeral. The body had already been jettisoned. The night passed in ice cold silence. In the morning, he was put to work at his usual machine. Apparently, he was not fast enough. The threatening tip of an electric spear pressed into the skin of his back, right between two ribs. When he turned to face the slaver, he was confronted with the face of a murderer. Something in him snapped, like a twig in a drought.

He tightened his grip on the crystalized spice in his hand and lunged. Panting, he dragged a thin bloody line across the slaver’s thigh. The next thing he knew, pain flooded his senses, coursing through his muscles in waves. He was shocked again and again, slipping in and out of consciousness. He thought he would die. The universe had other plans.

The stunt was one of his stupider decisions, and it earned him nothing but three days of the most brutal work they could find without a bite of food. His stomach gnawed at him all through the night. That first mouthful of watered-down broth tasted better than anything he could remember eating. One other thing changed. His wrists were shackled together, permanently, as a kind of punishment. He had just enough range of motion to work.

The routine was steady and awful. There was pain, work, and exhaustion, but there was something else, too. The need for freedom burned inside his soul. He did what he could to keep that fire going. For months, and a year, and then two, nothing changed. Then, one day, everything did. 

Attacks shook the ship left and right as a gang of pirates boarded. Blaster shots filled the hallways. Jango raised his hands in the air, and a lucky bolt severed his chains, freeing him from his confinement. Jango took the chance and ran, sliding to snatch an abandoned blaster where it lay on the ground. Even in the heat, as the hallway filled with smoke and worse, it felt cold against his skin. It had been a long time since he had held a blaster in his hand.

A man with the spiral tattoos sat crumpled at his feet, bleeding from the mouth. Shaking, the man turned to look at Jango, and begged him for help with empty promises. Either this man was an idiot, or he thought Jango was. All the slavers were the same to him. These were the people who had put a chip in his neck, had bought and sold men and women like engine parts, had worked them to the bone and shocked them to their knees, had starved him and kept them in chains. Jango _helped_ him, alright. He pulled the trigger and shot a smoldering hole through the man’s skull.

After all they had done, every slaver unlucky enough to come across him got what they deserved.

What he needed to do was remove his chip. Escaping with an explosive intact would be a disaster. They had a device for that on board somewhere, he just had to find it. Gripping the blaster in his hands, Jango ducked into a supply closet. There they were. The devices themselves were unassuming things, resting on their charging docks. He powered one up with his thumb. It buzzed to life in his hand and he pressed the business end against his neck.

He gasped as the chip tore itself free. The removal process looked fairly painless when he had seen it happen. Maybe that came with experience and a desire to keep the merchandise intact. None of that mattered now, though. He had places to be. 

Jango crushed the chip under the heel of his foot and ran. The force of the explosion slammed his body against the wall of the corridor. Scrambling to his feet, he made for the docking bay. In the haze of the battle, he managed to steal a shuttle unnoticed. The cockpit was cramped, and he doubted it even had a working hyperdrive, but none of that mattered.

He was a free man now. As he flew out of range of the ship, a loose plan took root in his brain. He knew where his armor was. Galidraan would never know what hit it. He would steal it back, he would track down Tor Vizsla, and he would get his revenge if it killed him. If not, Jango could pick up the pieces of his life. He could start over.

In the end, his armor was stripped of its paint, its history; but it was his again. Tor Vizsla died like the animal he was. Jango Fett had his freedom back. Whatever happened, and whatever he did, he would never live another day without it.

**Author's Note:**

> y'all like my decapitation joke? i couldn't make myself delete it


End file.
